Psychological Warfare During the Korean War

Abstract

This study examines how the effects of Cold War rhetoric, especially Korean War-era psychological warfare, manifest dramatically in media coverage of crises or conflicts involving the former adversaries of the Cold War in the Far East. After identifying major clusters of the Korean War-era rhetorical polemics from various psywar leaflets, this study demonstrates how the effects of political self-indoctrination have surfaced in the U.S. and Chinese media coverage of the 1991–94 North Korean nuclear weapons development crisis, the North Korean famine crisis of the mid-1990s, the South Korean financial crisis of 1997–98 and the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The study contends that various “enemy images,” cultivated and reinforced through the process of self-indoctrination over an extended period, have provided a journalistic framing device which ultimately contributes to a non-dialogic media-based political discourse among the former adversaries of the Korean War.